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A continuing selection of classic and contemporary poems.

Consolation

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

All are not taken; there are left behind
  Living Belovèds, tender looks to bring
  And make the daylight still a happy thing,
And tender voices, to make soft the wind:
But if it were not so—if I could find
  No love in all this world for comforting,
  Nor any path but hollowly did ring
Where ‘dust to dust’ the love from life disjoin’d;
And if, before those sepulchres unmoving
  I stood alone (as some forsaken lamb
Goes bleating up the moors in weary dearth)
Crying ‘Where are ye, O my loved and loving?’—
  I know a voice would sound, ‘Daughter, I AM.
Can I suffice for Heaven and not for earth?’
Online text © 1998-2008 Poetry X. All rights reserved.
From The Oxford Book of English Verse: 1250-1900 | Clarendon, 1919
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